Sunday, June 24, 2012

Continuing Samhain Horror's line of reprinted Ramsey Campbell's novels is "The Hungry Moon", an eerie tale about a small England village besieged first by rabid Christian Evangelicals and then the dark, pagan, moon-worshiping force they accidentally awaken.

For the most part a smart story offering acute observations on the dangers of religious fanaticism, Campbell's usually suspenseful "quiet horror" does drag a little towards the end. Taken as a whole, however, Campbell delivers the goods, as always: poignant characterization, sterling craft, creeping dread, and unsettling unease.

Godwin Mann (yes, read that as God - Win - Man) is on a quest to win souls for God. Embarrassed by his father's B-Movie horror past (Dad played the Devil once in a film), Godwin experiences a life-changing "conversion" and becomes a self-styled version of Billy Graham, leading crusades and marches and rallies, all to advance the Good News. And he's come to England's shores to continue God's Good Work. He's come to the small town of Moonwell to rid it of its "pagan past", to "win the town for the Lord."

And initially, he and his troupe of believers find a foothold in Moonwell. A moderately Christian town paradoxically proud of its Druid traditions, Moonwell's Christian residents see Godwinn's arrival almost akin to their own Second Coming, a chance to "purify" Moonwell of its pagan influences, once and for all. Battle lines are drawn, friend turned against friend, families divided. All in the name of Godwinn Man's "holy quest".

But when Mann confronts the source of Moonwell's Druid traditions (a deep cave in which legends say Old Beings dwell), he returns....changed. No longer human, Godwin Mann uses his influence and newly "won" town to unleash an unspeakable darkness. Night falls...and stays. Daily deliveries - even the newspaper - from the outside world cease. No one can leave. No one can enter from outside Moonwell, as the demon that is now Godwin Mann slowly erases Moonwell, cutting it off from the rest of the world, hiding it in a perpetual night lit only by a strange, bloated moon.

And this moon is hungry. And angry, for being ignored all these years.

As always, you get what you expect in a Ramsey Campbell novel: smooth, flowing prose, deep characters, subtle emotional plays, and a lingering dread that settles right at the base of the neck. In this case, perhaps "The Hungry Moon" runs a little too long. The darkness settles around town very early, and readers can also guess pretty quickly what's happened to Mann.

However, this novel's strength lies not in it's plot, necessarily, but in character development, as religious fanaticism not only tears the town apart, but ultimately leaves Moonwell completely vulnerable to the demon-possessed Godwin Mann. That's where this novel's real power comes from, in Campbell's portrayal of friends and family torn apart by the Lord's "Good News."

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine, a blogger for The Midnight Diner, and a podcaster at Tales to Terrify. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He's
currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at
Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives
in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is
the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he's currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Normally,
I'd start off with some kind of hook, a generalized statement that
ties into my feelings about the book being reviewed. Summary. A well
reasoned list of pro's and con's. Professional and clean, if a bit self-conscious at times.

That's
not what you're getting today, because this isn't that kind of book.

The
back flap breakdown would have you believe that this is a story of a
man forced to return home to a broken family of crooks and thieves.
Faced with the brutality of his brother's murder spree, he's been
asked to find the killer of the one person his brother didn't kill. A
murder mystery wrapped in the barbs of crime fiction curled in the
velvet black drapes of noir.

But
that is also not what you are getting today, because it isn't that
type of book.

It's
not really about any of those things, at least not to me. To me, this
is a tale of the sicknesses and sins floating in blood, embedded in
flesh. It's about a man's struggle to find out if he is bound to the
same fate as his family, if genetics, like anatomy, is truly destiny.
The murderous brother who went mad dog one night and killed an old
woman, a family of five (their little daughter included). The history
of graft and theft running generations deep. The dementia whose roots
have all but mushed the brains of the family's eldest and have begun
to worm their way into the younger ones as well. These things that
our dear, humble narrator wants so desperately to believe he can
extricate himself from but fears with just as much certainty that he
cannot escape.

It
says so much about the effect of Piccirilli's writing on me that I
cannot remove myself from it, that I can only speak of it in terms of
myself. That's why I, quite frankly, ride his nuts as if they are my
favorite stallion. His writing is always so intensely personal, that
it becomes personal to me. Here is this man whom I have never met,
who knows nothing about me, yet whose words seem to understand the
deepest fears and hopes bursting inside of me.

Its
a bit scary, really.

I'll
just end with saying that The Last Kind Words resonates
against my own experiences in ways I don't care to share with
strangers, but it's there all the same. There will be those of you
put off by the first person narration and the somewhat overwrought
and bruise-purple prose but my own experience was sublime in the truest,
most Longinus(ian?) sense of the word.

Anton Cancre is one of those rotting,
pus-filled thingies on the underside of humanity that your mother
always warned you about. He has oozed symbolic word-farms onto the
pages of Shroud, Sex and Murder and Horrorbound magazines as well as
The Terror at Miskatonic Falls, an upcoming poetry anthology by
Shroud Publishing and continues to vomit his oh-so-astute literary
opinions, random thoughts and nonsense at antoncancre.blogspot.com.
No, he won't babysit you pet shoggoth this weekend. Stop asking.

Monday, June 11, 2012

“One missing pumpkin certainly did
not qualify as a visit from the Pumpkin Thief. But it was kind of
cool, getting all worked up the night before the holiday, a special
holiday devoted to celebrating evil and dead things.”

Nick seems like a pretty typical
seventeen-year-old. He has a lot of trouble with the girls at school,
just as much trouble with the bullies, and an annoying younger
sister. He also has a fascination with mystery stories and hopes to
some day become a detective. It’s his detective-like curiosity that
leads Nick to do a little investigation of a local legend called the
Pumpkin Thief. It all starts when the jack-o-lantern that Nick’s
family had sitting on the porch steps disappears. Nick finds a paper
written by a former student at his school and reads about a supposed
creature that steals pumpkins throughout an entire neighborhood in
order to really mess around with things and invite evil into the
town. According to the legend, nobody knows where the Pumpkin Thief
will strike, though the time is always around Halloween...

Nick doesn’t quite believe everything
he reads at first. He has enough to worry about between all of the
issues at school and outside of school. Lou, Nick’s archenemy,
never seems to want to leave the kid alone, and he is completely
outmatched in a fight. But when the Pumpkin Thief actually appears in
the town these kids live in, there’s no better equalizer than fear.

The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief is a
horror book that is written very well for its intended audience in
the Young Adult crowd. One of its biggest strengths is surely the
verisimilitude of high school life. It’s great that the book
actually doesn’t get too bogged down in the buildup to the spooky
climactic scenes; everything about Nick’s life has a chance to be
fleshed out. Charles Day’s tale is just as much about being a
seventeen-year-old kid with dreams as it is about horrifying
creatures intent on the destruction of mankind, and that is what
really makes the book in the end. The Pumpkin Thief himself is at
first a complete mystery, but when he reveals himself his impact is
felt in many ways. He really is a threat to the kids and everyone
else in Nick’s town and they have to work together to get rid of
the evil spirit.

This is a book that is a quick and
enjoyable read for adults but might be just a little more
entertaining for an audience that skews on the young side. Get it as
a gift for the teenager who likes mysteries or a little Halloween
spook.

Christopher Larochelle is buried under a huge pile of comics. At least that's his excuse for not updating his blog (where he used to write about them from time to time): www.clarocomics.blogspot.com. Visit it and encourage him to get back to updating.

As
a species, we are born hunters. No matter how removed from our
distant past we may get, buying slabs of neatly packaged and
processed meat from brightly lit coolers at the local grocery store,
the genetic memory is still buried somewhere deep in our subconscious.
That need to pounce and destroy. To feel the sweet, tangy taste of
blood dripping down out throat. At the very least, to avoid being
eaten ourselves. The stories in Hunter’s Moon deal with that
relationship of predator and prey, approaching it in ways that are
sometimes surprising and often quite entertaining.

The
best stories in this collection showcase R Scott McCoy’s more
playful side. “Jihad” is a great example of this, placing
the reader in the head of a man obsessed with destroying the rodents
that have overrun his house. Certainly, the analytic in me loves that
I was never sure what was real and what was purely a figment of the
protagonist’s growing psychosis but then he hit me with this: “I’m
not leaving my post, Steve. If I do, this position will be overrun.
If you want to help, bring me more peanut butter for the traps.” If
you didn’t fall in love with that line, I’m not talking to you
any more.

I
could go on, with stories like “Bitch Queen” (kegel enhanced
coochie and all), “Garbage Man” (always use a full sized
portrait) and “The Find” (bigfoot-‘nuff said) but you get the
point: McCoy knows how to tell a tale that is just downright fun. At the same time, his knack for building honest and true
feeling characters gives the more serious tales like the heartfelt
“The Last Line” and damn angry “Best Served Cold” the punch
they need to truly hit home.

Unfortunately,
there are times that McCoy’s old school, Serling-esque aesthetic
gets a tad too repetitive and predictable. Most of the time, the
personality and characters save those but there are times,
specifically in the cases of “Stream Scream” and “Regular
Customer”, where the story’s lack of a sense of cohesion or
direction kills the experience.

McCoy
isn’t out to change the world or shock us with his new and
outrageous approach to story telling. His work makes it clear that he
is out to do one thing and one thing only: spin a good yarn. Overall,
despite a few minor missteps, he certainly succeeds with this
collection.

Anton Cancre is one of those rotting, pus-filled thingies on the underside of humanity that your mother always warned you about. He has oozed symbolic word-farms onto the pages of Shroud, Sex and Murder and Horrorbound magazines as well as The Terror at Miskatonic Falls, an upcoming poetry anthology by Shroud Publishing and continues to vomit his oh-so-astute literary opinions, random thoughts and nonsense at antoncancre.blogspot.com. No, he won't babysit you pet shoggoth this weekend. Stop asking.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

The Wicked, by James Newman, is a frightfully fun exercise in classic eighties horror. The pacing is excellent, all the time-honored elements are there - evil comes to a small town, preying on vulnerable sensibilities, trying to become "flesh" - but most importantly, it's so very well written. The prose is lean, the characterization rings true and even at 325 pages, the story moves like a dragster fueled by the fires of Hell.

David, Kate and Becca Little moved to Morganville, North Carolina in a desperate attempt to start over. After Kate's assault and rape, the Littles are hurting, badly. This may be the only chance they have at saving their family and returning to some sense of normalcy. Especially with Kate's pregnancy looming above them. Because they don't know. Whose child is this? David's?

Or the rapists?

Much worse dangers lurk in the shadowed corners of Morganville, however. Invoked by the fire that destroyed the Heller Home for Children several months before the Littles arrived, an ancient demon has come forth. Its hunger is eternal, and not only does it want to defile and debase and corrupt all human life...

It wants the children. To fuel its unholy fires, and bring it forth from hell. And to defeat it, David must face sacrificing more than just his life...he may have to sacrifice everything he holds dear in this world.

The debate will always rage, one imagines, between those who champion "introspective, literary horror" and those who favor the more visceral sub-genres like splatterpunk and monster fiction (zombies, vampires, etc). And that's the best thing about The Wicked. It's so well written. Boasts a tight narrative that moves well, and there's plenty of regular "life stuff" (regarding Kate's trauma over her rape) for this to be more than just horror.

But it IS horror, at its core. A classic tale of good versus evil, and it's done very well. Also, major credit goes to the publisher, Shock Totem, in the product itself. In a print on demand age when any "Joe" can become a "publisher" and churn out reams of substandard products, not only have they elected to start their novel line with a proven winner in James Newman, but they've knocked this one of out of the park in terms of design. Right town to a little "Totem's Grocery" discount label on the novel's back cover, and those beloved creases of a well-worn paperback.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine and a blogger for The Midnight Diner. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He's
currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at
Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives
in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is
the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he's currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead spawned legions of movies and books about the animated, lurching, flesh-eating dead. Hailed as a classic by horror fans, cited as foundational by many writers and directors, it could be argued that it changed the landscape of horror cinema dramatically.

John Russo, acclaimed screenwriter, co-wrote the screenplay and also produced two novel versions, Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead - the latter being the original version, not the version based on Dan O'Bannon's horror comedy.

And now, for the first time in thirty years, both these works are available again in Cemetery Dance's new limited edition collection, Undead. There's nothing overly special about the prose or the stories themselves - they're straight zombie stories: violent, bloody, stripped down and fast-paced, executed adequately - but the addition of the original version of ROTLD makes this a collector's item for lovers of all things zombie, and definitely the right gift for that zombie fan in your life that already has everything.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine and a blogger for The Midnight Diner. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He's
currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at
Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives
in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is
the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he's currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.